November’s CKAN Ecosystem Catalog Site of the Month is the Toronto Open Data Portal, which provides public access to municipal datasets covering a wide range of city services and initiatives.
The Portal itself is an excellent example of the diversity of data that municipal portals make available to their constituents, and also of how those data can be used to tell stories and connect with the lived experiences and concerns of local residents.
We are also particularly pleased to feature Toronto this month because of the additional context the City has provided in its Ecosystem Catalog record. Alongside the usual portal information, the team has included the City’s Open Data Master Plan, offering a detailed account of the principles and priorities behind Toronto’s open-data program and providing the full context needed to better understand how the data made available through the portal came to be there in the first place.
The plan was developed through public consultation and published in 2018, offering a remarkably transparent, thoughtful account of all that is required behind the scenes to make government data meaningfully open. Alongside technical priorities such as improving data quality and modernizing publication processes, it is careful to also address the organizational conditions necessary to support them - including securing the buy-in of the city staff who would be sharing them. The authors recognized that making open data a routine part of municipal operations would require the participation and commitment of staff across City departments, many of whom faced competing priorities, limited resources, and understandable concerns about how their data might be interpreted or used.
The plan therefore devotes considerable attention to building internal capacity and support for open data, including training, recognition of staff contributions, clearer responsibilities, and an internal community of practice. It also acknowledges that simply publishing datasets does not ensure that people can use them. Context is also critical, which is why we were so delighted to find the City’s Master Plan shared with the open data it’s enabled.
The CKAN Ecosystem Catalog was designed to document the breadth of the CKAN ecosystem and provide a resource that community members can contribute to and maintain themselves. The City of Toronto’s record offers a terrific example of how this can work, combining a tailored description of the portal with supporting documentation to help users better understand the context in which its data are generated and shared.
Over time, we hope that more site managers and maintainers will update and customize their records like the team at Toronto have. If you are a site manager and would like to get started, there is guidance available here to help you create an account, and claim your sites, tools, extensions as a first step.
We’ve already used it to find extensions that already exist (so we dont build them ourselves) and take ideas from other portal.